Posts tagged with 'personal'

I don’t want to criticize the outcome of the UK’s EU referendum — first of all I’m not wiser than everyone else, and second in a democracy you always have the right to decide both ways. Freedom absolutely includes the freedom to hurt yourself and do bad decisions (note, I’m explicitly not saying — or even knowing! — which is which!).

What concerns me though, is how the course of political debates at large and this referendum in particular have been going. Real policital debates and consensus finding are the essence of democracy, but they essentially stopped many years ago in the US already; with the two major parties just talking/swearing about each other but not any more with each other, and every little proposal gets ridiculously blown up to a crusade. The EU is of course not exempt from that in general, although for most day-to-day political work it’s much more moderate due to most states having proportional instead of majority voting, which enforces coalitions and thus compromises on an institutional level. But the very same bad dispute style immediately came to surface with the Brexit referendum — the arguments have been highly emotional, misleading, populistic, and were often outright lies, like £50M a day (it’s just a third of that, and the ROI is enormous!), or the visa issue for Turkey. This causes voting to be based on stirred emotions, false information, whoever shouts the loudest, and which politician of the day you really want to give a slap in the face, instead of voting rationally on the actual matter at hand and what the best long-term path is.

But we have a saying in Germany: “Nichts wird so heiß gegessen wie es gekocht wird.”, which translates as “Nothing get eaten as hot as it gets cooked.”. In the end, the EU treaties are all just paper, and as long as there are enough people agreeing the rules have been, and will be bent/ignored/adjusted. And dear UK, you of all people should know this ☺ (SCNR). So while today emotions are high, bank charts look crazy, some colleagues are worrying about their employment in the UK etc., there’s nothing more reliable than the human nature — all off this will eventually be watered down, procrastinated, and re-negotiated during the next two (haha, maybe 10) years.

If this has taught us anything though: this looks like yet another example of bad application of direct democracy. In my opinion representative democracy is the better structure for such utterly complex and rather abstract topics that we can’t in good faith expect the general populus to understand. This isn’t meant to sound derogatory — it’s just a consequence of a highly developed world with an extreme grade of division of work. You don’t propose (I hope!) a referendum about how to build a bridge, airplane turbine, pacemaker, or OS kernel; we educate, train, and pay specialists for that. But for the exact same reason we have professional politicians who have the time to think about/negotiate/understand complex issues like EU treaties, and what their benefits and costs are. That said, direct democracy certainly has its place for issues that you can expect the general populus to have a qualified opinion on: Should we rather build a highway or 10 kindergartens? Do you want both for 3% more taxes? Should smoking be prohibited in public places? So the tricky question is how to tell these apart and who decides that.

I have used LaTeX and latex-beamer for pretty much my entire life of document and presentation production, i. e. since about my 9th school grade. I’ve always found the LaTeX syntax a bit clumsy, but with good enough editor shortcuts to insert e. g. \begin{itemize} \item...\end{itemize} with just two keystrokes, it has been good enough for me.

A few months ago a friend of mine pointed out pandoc to me, which is just simply awesome. It can convert between a million document formats, but most importantly take Markdown and spit out LaTeX, or directly PDF (through an intermediate step of building a LaTeX document and calling pdftex). It also has a template for beamer. Documents now look soo much more readable and are easier to write! And you can always directly write LaTeX commands without any fuss, so that you can use markdown for the structure/headings/enumerations/etc., and LaTeX for formulax, XYTex and the other goodies. That’s how it should always should have been! ☺

It seemed too good to be true after my last post, and it was. Within days I had relapsed after finishing the last course of Bactrim my symptoms were back, worse than ever. So bad, that I had a trip to hospital courtesy of an ambulance which had to be called because I was in so much pain. Oh sweet, sweet morphine, you are a cruel mistress.

The Bactrim was only holding the Bartonella at bay, it seems. My LLMD has now put me on a month’s worth of Ciprofloxacin, after verifying that a sore tendon was not too damaged. Why do that? Well, Cipro screws up tendons and ligaments if you take it too long so I had to verify that things were OK to start with. I also have to take it easy and not exert myself too much in case I damage weakened tendons.

The one piece of good news is that a recent endoscopy showed no fungal infection from all the antibiotics I’ve been taking. Unfortunately an echo test on my heart still shows a lot of fluid in the pericardial sac and I still have a huge amount of pain there which keeps me awake at night.

Because of all this, I am sad to be missing a work function in Austin this week, but it would have been foolish to travel with the tendon risk (moving my luggage would be a problem), my high levels of fatigue, and not to mention the pericardial fluid can become life-threatening at any time.

I’ve now been on treatment for Lyme disease for a little over twelve months. Without a doubt, this has been the worst twelve months of my entire life. It’s almost impossible to convey the range of pain that I have endured, the mental anguish, and the struggle to find the will to live.

Six months ago I was about at rock bottom. I was going trough herxes from hell, suffering from heart complications including cardiac pauses (my heart would stop for several seconds at a time), and headaches that felt like someone was driving a pick axe into my skull. Then there was the brain fog; the confusion and memory loss that left me feeling stupid and helpless in front of people who just didn’t understand how I could not remember simple things I had talked about with them only a few hours ago.

On top of that, I had extreme fatigue that left me unable to climb the stairs at home without stopping every few steps to get my strength back in my legs. Many of my days have been spent as a quivering mess on the floor, unable to speak, move or do anything because I was in so much pain and close to passing out.

In short, I was pretty fucked and thought I was about to die at any time.

Then I discovered an antibiotic that was actually making a difference to my heart symptoms—it’s called Bactrim (or Trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole to give it its full name). I started taking it in late December and two weeks later I was heart symptom free! The course of drugs then ran out (I had 4 weeks’ worth) and ten days later I had relapsed and was getting chest pains and palpitations again. I started another month’s course and felt better again after a couple of weeks, so it was clear that this drug was doing something to help me with my Bartonella infection.

It struck me that I have been so ill for a long time that I hadn’t really noticed that I was slowly getting better lately. At least I hope I am getting better — I’m now at a “wait and see” stage after having stopped the Bactrim for a second time and hoping to hell that I don’t have another relapse. I’m probably about 50% better than I was a year ago, I now have to wait for the last remnants of the Lyme and Bartonella bacteria to be driven out of my system.

Although I still use my desktop replacement (i.e., little-to-no battery life) for a good chunk of my work, recent additions to my setup have resulted in some improvements that I thought others might be interested in.

For Christmas just gone my wonderful wife Suzanne – and my equally wonderful children, but let’s face it was her money not theirs! – bought me a HP Chromebook 14. Since the Chromebooks were first announced, I was dismissive of them, thinking that at best they would be a cheap laptop to install Ubuntu on. However over the last year my attitudes had changed, and I came to realise that at least 70% of my time is spent in some browser or other, and of the other 30% most is spent in a terminal or Sublime Text. This realisation, combined with the improvements Intel Haswell brought to battery life made me reconsider my position and start seriously looking at a Chromebook as a 2nd machine for the couch/coffee shop/travel.

I initially focussed on the HP Chromebook 11 and while the ARM architecture didn’t put me off, the 2GB RAM did. When I found the Chromebook 14 with a larger screen, 4GB RAM and Haswell chipset, I dropped enough subtle hints and Suzanne got the message.

So Christmas Day came and I finally got my hands on it! First impressions were very favourable: this neither looks nor feels like a £249 device. ChromeOS was exactly what I was expecting, and generally gets out of my way. The keyboard is superb, and I would compare it in quality to that of my late MacBook Pro. Battery life is equally superb, and I’m easily getting 8+ hours at a time.

Chrome – and ChromeOS – is not without limitations though, and although a new breed of in-browser environments such as Codebox, Koding, Nitrous.io, and Cloud9 are giving more options for developers, what I really want is a terminal. Enter Secure Shell from Google – SSH in your browser (with public key authentication). This lets me connect to any box of my choosing, and although I could have just connected back to my desk-bound laptop, I would still be limited to my barely-deserves-the-name-broadband ADSL connection.

So, with my Chromebook and SSH client in place, DigitalOcean was my next port of call, using their painless web interface to create an Ubuntu-based droplet. Command Line Interfaces are incredibly powerful, and despite claims to the contrary most developers spending most of their time with them1. There are a plethora of tools to improve your productivity, and my three must-haves are:

With this droplet I can do pretty much anything I need that ChromeOS doesn’t provide, and connect through to the many other droplets, linodes, EC2 nodes, OpenStack nodes and other servers I use personally and professionally.

In some other posts I’ll expand on how I use (and – equally importantly – how I secure) my DigitalOcean droplets, and which “apps” I use with Chrome.

The fact that I now spend most of my time in the browser and not on the command-line shows you that I’ve settled into my role as an engineering manager! ↩

I’ve been experiencing bad headaches all week and today’s is awful. I don’t know if it’s the drugs starting to work and causing a herx or if I just have a headache from the disease. 400mg of Ibuprofen 2.5 hours ago hasn’t helped much

I am writing this blog post because I want to raise awareness of an increasingly common condition across the world. This is my history leading up to my recent discovery.

After many years of thinking something was wrong with me and not knowing whether I was crazy or just imagining things, I was recently diagnosed with Lyme Disease. It is a horrible disease with myriad symptoms (I have about 90% of those listed) that are easily misdiagnosed by doctors. The disease is caused by a bacteria called Borrelia and is transmitted through tick bites. Not everyone realises that they’ve had a tick bite and certainly I don’t remember one.

It started with chest pains

I originally visited a doctor a couple of years ago because I was getting a lot of chest pain. After a short time using a portable ECG monitor he diagnosed me with Atrial Ectopic Beats, a supposedly harmless but sometimes debilitating condition, and I certainly felt debilitated every time my heart started palpitating. His diagnosis led him to prescribe beta-blockers to help prevent the extra beats that were occurring in my heart. Needless to say, it didn’t really help me and left me feeling generally worse as my heart was now unable to pump blood at any rate required above doing minimal exercise. I took myself off these because I felt that I’d rather deal with the occasional chest pain than feel awful 24 hours a day.

The first discovery – pericarditis

Over the next year the condition sporadically got worse and I started getting really sharp pains in my chest. After a few trips to hospital in the back of an ambulance I was fortunate enough to find a cardiologist who was prepared to do some more investigations rather than brushing things under the rug. He scheduled me for a Stress Echocardiogram which basically entails ultrasound imaging of your heart before and after running on a treadmill while hooked up to an ECG print. The upshot of this exam was that my heart was fine, but I was now diagnosed with a new condition called pericarditis.

Pericarditis is an inflammation of the pericardium – the sac that surrounds your heart – and is responsible for causing the palpitations. I had about 7mm of fluid trapped between my heart and my pericardium. My initial reaction to this was one of relief. ”Great!” I thought, now we can treat it. I was prescribed a course of a medicine called colchicine. It is usually used to treat gout, but is also known to specifically treat pericarditis quite effectively.

Treatment, but still getting worse

One month after starting to take the colchicine I felt no difference in my symptoms at all. This left me feeling a little depressed, especially since I’ve been experiencing increasing symptoms and took myself to hospital yet again as I was worried about having a cardiac tamponade, which is fatal if not treated quickly. I went back to the cardiologist to see what else I could do. He prescribed me some powerful steroids – immuno-suppressants – the intention being to stop my body from reacting to whatever it disliked that was causing the inflammation around my heart.

At this point I was at rock bottom – the idea of being on steroids to control the condition filled me with dread. I have previously taken topical steroids for skin conditions and I am all too aware of their nasty side effects. So, I made a decision to start being more proactive in helping myself and set out to learn more about this condition called pericarditis.

The second discovery

After a bit of Googling I found this pericarditis support group. It was quite reassuring to find a bunch of other people who were going through the same thing as me, although still fairly depressing that many people were either stuck on steroids or just learning to live with the pain. Eventually I came across this post entitled “Lyme Disease Checklist” – I had never heard of this Lyme thing before so I clicked through and started reading.

What I read in that post has been life-changing.

It was immediately apparent to me that I ticked nearly all of the boxes on the checklist. It made me realise that things that had been niggling me in the back of my head were actually real and that this could finally be an underlying cause for all of my symptoms. These are symptoms that are going back for some years now – I had thought that perhaps I was just getting old and some mental faculties were waning as my short-term memory and concentration levels had been bad and getting worse, and suffering from severe fatigue and getting joint pains. It turns out I can blame it all on Lyme Disease.

Finding a doctor

At this point I realised that my cardiologist was not going to be able to help with this, so I set out to find someone who could. The support group postings had been very clear about one thing: finding a doctor is not easy. It seems as though there ‘s a lot of controversy about Lyme and finding a Lyme literate doctor is essential. This appears to be particularly hard here in Australia as there’s severe resistance to belief that it can be caught here (I caught mine elsewhere though) as it is seen as a northern hemisphere problem. I discovered the Lyme Disease Association of Australia who put me on to a doctor 2 hours north of Brisbane called Andrew Ladhams. I drove up to see him for an initial consultation and he recommended that I send some blood to a lab in California that specialises in diagnosing Lyme disease. I got the results 3 weeks later and they were inconclusive, showing some positive and some indicative test bands. However since the test is notoriously unreliable the recommendation is that the test is used in conjunction with a medical diagnosis. Dr Ladhams decided that I should begin a course of treatment of antimalarial and antibiotics.

He also said that based on the test results, it’s possible that the strain of Borrelia I have could be from South East Asia. I have not been there since the year 2002. That means I’ve had this disease for over 10 years.

Antibiotics work by attacking bacteria when they are weakest – at the point they divide. Most bacteria divides every few minutes, but the Borrelia bacteria divides every 12-24 hours. This means that treatment has to take much longer than a regular course, probably 6-12 months.

I am now two weeks into my treatment. I am ramping up the antimalarial before starting on the antibiotics. I am hopeful that I’ll start feeling better in a few weeks, however it remains to be seen whether I will regain all my faculties as permanent damage could have occurred, particularly in my joints.

I will keep blogging about this disease as my treatment progresses, and if anyone reading this has any doubts about their own symptoms I urge you to visit a Lyme literate doctor. If I make even one person aware and help them out as a result of this blog, I’ll be happy.

A little more than a year ago I started working for Canonical full time on the Windows port of Ubuntu One. One of the great things of working for Canonical is that you work at home, that is, you do not have to move to the USA or the UK to do the job you love, but don’t get confused, working at home does has its downs and here are a list of some them.

Social interaction

Most of us, geeks, most of the time we do not require as much social interaction as the ‘normal’ people. This does not mean we are less social, but due to the nature of our work we need to concentrate for long periods of time to be able to solve complicated problem which might involve thousands of lines of code, in this situation having a colleague popping in your cubicle asking if you wanna have a coffee is less than ideal. When working at home you do not have this type of social interactions which at the very begging seems to be a very convenient thing, unfortunately it is not like that.

As Aristotle said:

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

The above is something certainly important to remember. No matter how much we believe that we do not need social contact, at the end of the day, it is needed because it is an intrinsic part of our being. We need human contact and no type of online interaction will be ever be able to replace a face to face interaction between two people.

I you do work at home make sure you get such interaction, and not only with your wife or girlfriend. I have learned this the hard way, I believe that this happened because during a period or time I became a monster that did not need any type of social interaction which is something I terribly regret and I have strongly tried to solve. The following are somethings I have decided to do:

I’m not literally working at home anymore. I’m looking for a shared office space so that I have to leave the house. As soon as I have found a place I will only be using the IPad at home, any other machine will be forbidden.

For a time I was going less and less to the rugby trainings, this will change as soon as the season starts.

As with rugby, I stopped going to the gym, this will stop.

I’ll force myself to go out at least once a week (although I have to admit that after this I have been going out a lot more)

Working hours

Before I started working for Canonical I worked at GDF (Electrabel to be more precise) dealing with issues between the interaction of an ASP.Net front end and a Java backend. There is no need to say that I hated the job. While I worked there I would never to an extra hour, I’d arrive at 9 and will leave at 6 without giving a damm if anyone needed me to stay an extra hour. I did this because during my free hours I wanted to work on applicatios to be used on Ubuntu and I had no passion for my everyday job.

Now this has changed, and my everyday job is my passion. This is great but it has become a small problem regarding the working hours, I do to many. I seem not to be able to stop and that is no good. I have started to be more strict with the working hours so that I do not work more than 9/10 hours (I don’t like to count reading emails and bug reports as work).

Summary

This are the problems that trouble me, which are yours? Nevertheless the oatmeal is bloody right.

Finally three containers with all goodies, according to their t-shirts size @ 2:30 PM, 26th January, 2011

Registration Counter @ 7:00 PM, 26th January, 2011

Agenda @ 9:10 PM, 26th January, 2011

UDD Presentation Hall @ 11:00 PM, 26th January, 2011

UDD Demonstration Room @ 3:00 AM 27 January, 2011

It was very interesting and busy day for all, packing bags to preparing demo room, shaping final presentations. We were very excited to see all Ubuntuers on UDD. And, OMG!!! that dream came true. Here is a picture taken 15 minutes before the UDD started. And, I believe Picture Speaks Louder Then The Words, OMG!!! It is!

Fronte-Right-Corner: A picture taken 15 minutes before the UDD started.

REAR-Right-Corner: A picture taken 15 minutes before the UDD started.

Though, i was busy @ UDD Demonstration Counter, organized by Canonical and OEMs and LOEMs, showing their devices with Ubuntu, so i would not write much about UDD Presentation, later in this blog i will cover UDD Presentation source and community blog, covering whole UDD Presentation part. Again coming back to demo part, We demoed Wipro Machines (Netbook, Notebook, Tablet, Desktops), Lenovo All-In-One M90Z with Ubuntu 10.10, Dell Zino and Dell Latitude Netbook with Ubuntu Light. Most of the attendees were interested in getting list of Machine pre-installed with Ubuntu and available in Indian market. And that was one of the common need of all. And we surprised by seeing huge demand for that. In past, i have covered in my blog with picture of some LOEM brand with Ubuntu showcasing in CROMA. I got huge demand from attendees to generate and promote list of LOEMs and OEMs shipping machines with Pre-installed Ubuntu in Indian Consumer / Retail Market. We are already doing this for enterprise and corporates. I am sure i will cover that list in future blog. We had given 1 hour for UDD Demonstration Counter, combined with UDD Break in UDD Agenda. But personally, i was much more busy during the day for demonstration Read more

I have seen lot of buzz around that, registration has been closed for Ubuntu Developer Day, Bangalore, Jan 27, 2011! Yes it’s very true. We are very sorry to say that we have closed registration for Ubuntu Developer Day, Bangalore, Jan 27, 2011, due to being hugely oversubscribed. We did this two days ago, when we were 10 days away from event. It gives me two kind of feeling (:) – :(). But, i believe it has created huge hope and fundamentals for Ubuntu and proved it’s position before the event. This is just beginning….

I am personally sorry for those, who have missed the registration. See you all, who have registered and planned to attend UDD :).